okay so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (Tech class) and im still trying to wrap my head around how repeaters actually work in practice. i got my Baofeng programmed with the local 147.xxx repeater and i can hear people just fine but when i try to key up nobody seems to hear me, or at least nobody responds.

i looked up the repeater on repeaterbook and it lists a CTCSS tone of 100.0 hz. i have that set as my transmit tone but im not sure if i also need to set it as my receive tone or not. my radio has separate settings for TX and RX tones and honestly the manual is not super helpful. also someone at my club meeting mentioned something about a "linked system" and now im wondering if thats related to why things seem weird sometimes - like sometimes i hear stations that sound like theyre coming from really far away and the audio is a bit choppy.

any help would be appreciated, still learning all this stuff and dont want to step on anyone or violate any etiquette rules by accident

Hey welcome to the hobby, dont stress too much about this stuff it clicks pretty fast once you use it a while. For the CTCSS thing - you only need the tone set on your transmit side to access most repeaters. The RX tone (sometimes called "tone squelch" or "CTCSS decode") just filters what you hear on your end, so if you set it you'll only hear stations that are also sending that tone. A lot of people leave the RX tone off so they hear everything coming through the repeater regardless. So yeah just make sure 100.0 is set as your TX tone and you should be able to get into it.

As for the linked system thing, some repeaters around here are connected to other repeaters via internet linking - stuff like EchoLink or IRLP or AllStar. When a link is active you might hear someone from a totally different state or even another country, and yeah sometimes the audio can sound a little off or delayed because of the internet connection. Totally normal. Etiquette-wise just listen for a few seconds before keying up to make sure nobody is mid-QSO, and when you first key up just say your callsign and say something like "monitoring" or ask if the frequency is in use. You'll get the hang of it.

oh man i had the exact same problem when i started, spent like two weeks thinking my radio was broken lol. turned out i had programmed the offset wrong so my signal wasnt even hitting the repeater input. might be worth double checking that too - the offset on a 2m repeater is usually plus or minus 600 khz and you need to make sure its going the right direction. repeaterbook should list whether its a + or - offset.

the linked system stuff is pretty cool once you get used to it, theres a repeater near me thats on a big network and sometimes you hear nets happening with people all over the place. just be aware that on a linked system theres usually a bit of a delay so wait a second after the repeater tail drops before you key up or youll probably step on someone on another node. some repeaters also have specific times when the link is active vs when its just local so worth listening for a bit to figure out whats going on before jumping in.